I don’t know about you, but generally it’s been my experience with weddings over the years, both as “officiating clergy” and also as the father of a bride on one occasion and of a groom on another occasion, that a wedding is one of those rites of passage that everybody is supposed to take very seriously. Which is right, I suppose, since it’s supposed to happen only once in a lifetime and involve public acknowledgement of intentional, permanent commitments, and acceptance of new and changed responsibilities, and a departure from, if not rejection of, one set of human relationships, in preference for a new social relationship with a new person, forever.

 

So weddings are serious things, to be taken seriously. Everybody’s supposed to do what they’re told to do: the bride’s father by the bride’s mother and the bride herself, the officiating clergy by the state, county, and ecclesiastical agencies who grant them authority to perform the ritual of marriage in behalf of the state or the church.  Even the guests are supposed to take the invitation seriously and do what they’re told to do on this seriously important occasion. The man Jesus talked about a couple of weeks ago, who came to the wedding dressed in his brown shoes and seersucker suit, learned that the hard way.

 

At weddings, you’re supposed to do what you’re expected to do. If you’re a participant, you prepare and do your job well. Friendship and respect are dependent on it. You wear what you’re told to wear. You do what custom and culture calls for you to do in your role. If you’re a bridesmaid whose job it is on the evening before the ceremony to help light the way for the bridegroom to find his way to the home of the bride’s parents, to fetch her to his own home for a night-long and day-long wedding ceremony, you take enough oil for your lamp to do the job.

 

If the groom is delayed by his own preparations and bachelor celebrations, you take a nap on the warm desert sand, but when at midnight someone shouts “Here comes the groom!” you better be ready. He’s going to do it only once. There’ll be no pauses or second takes for the camera. If you miss it, you lose your opportunity to have a meaningful role in the ceremony. The doors to the party get closed. You can’t get in. Neither you nor your lanterns have purpose anymore. It’s as though you have no role. It’s as though the host of the party has no idea who you are. You have no function, no value for the party that’s going on inside. What a perfectly awful situation!

 

But hold tight. Let’s stop and take stock of our situation in this season-long journey of ours through Matthew’s Gospel. Let’s reconnoiter for a minute. 

 

Things have heated-up quickly since the Jesus entered Jerusalem in Chapter 21. The social and cultural structures for ordinary life have been turned end for end, like the money-changers tables in the temple narthex. Lame people have been walking upright again. Terminally sick people are being cured. Blind people are seeing for the first time. The valueless suddenly have value again. The powerless suddenly have power again. The former structures and infra-structures are teetering, very much at increased risk, because of the growing popularity of the radical young rabbi who has recently come to town.

 

“What authority do you have?” they ask him. He answers by telling stories:   Of vineyards and laborers paid the same in spite of inequalities in their efforts and time on the job, as if simply by being and breathing they have intrinsic value for the lord master of the vineyard regardless of the contribution they make to the owner’s purpose or well-being. God’s kingdom, he says, the amazing community that I have come to introduce to you and lead you toward is like that: stories, stories of parties and banquets and banquet invitations, of mistreatment of the messengers who carry the invitations, of the anger of the host who gives the party, of the host’s response…stories…told by a young rabbi, in response to a question: “What authority do you have?”

 

They try to trap him. He avoids their snares and turns their own traps against them. He curses the establishment politicians to hell and back: “Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!” Liars!” (What a wonderful text for the Presidential campaign season we’re just now entering. Already they’re calling one another liars.)

 

And just before today’s Gospel lesson (which is the first of three teachings in Matthew 25 on the coming of God’s amazing community) just before that, at the end of Chapter 24, the time when that new and amazing kingdom will appear and this one will disappear, that time is very, very near. Jesus points to the temple and says, not one stone will be left upon another. All will be turned upside down on the Day of Lord, as if to demonstrate his point. It will happen soon: “This generation will not have passed away until all these things will have taken place.” Chapter 24, verse 34. It will happen suddenly, unexpectedly, like a coronary in the night, I suppose. “About that time and place, no one knows.” Chapter 24, verse 36.  The Son of Man will come at an unexpected hour, “like a thief in the night.” Chapter 24, verse 44. You must be ready.

 

You must be ready. We’ve come to the climax of our story, the open end of the crescendo. Imagine the edge of a high cliff. There’s no place to go but outward into unknown space, or back. Back isn’t an option. Or…we might imagine an encounter with a wall of fog. Stepping into it, all sense of direction disappears. Or, imagine being alone in a dense forest at night. It is literally too dark to see your hand in front of your face. Or the hand or frightened face of your date for the evening whose hands on your elbow are smashing the bone under the skin in a grip of terror, and whose words are a curse upon both you and your fraternity brothers whose little joke of abandoning you in Whipple Dam State Park after the hayride, has now gotten out of hand. (I never got another date with Raven Fennell!) So dark you cannot see. So angry, you cannot think. I should have been prepared. No flashlight. Not even a match.

 

 Or...a Middle Eastern desert at night, with a reverse wind that gathers the granules of sand into the air a half-mile or so and creates a blanket of dust that hides the stars and the moon, and all is absolutely without light. I remember a student at McCormick Seminary when I worked there. She had been an army nurse in Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm. I remembered what she said the reverse winds were like in Saudi Arabia when I was thinking about this Gospel lesson last week and about the story of the bridesmaids and lanterns, and the illumination they would provide began to have new meaning.

 

 You must be prepared, the rabbi says. You must be prepared. And the preparation has to begin now. You can’t wait until tomorrow when the lamp shops and oil merchants reopen. The way must be illuminated now. The bridegroom comes. The midnight hour is now. A voice shouts the bridegroom is coming now. The banquet in God’s amazing new community is beginning now. You see, time as it’s measured in our current experience on this side of the kingdom of heaven is of no consequence in the new community to which Jesus’ parables point us. It doesn’t matter that the apocalyptic moment, the Day of Judgment that Jesus describes, is delayed generation after generation.  The time is now!

 

 Do you remember the lesson from I Thessalonians that we read a few minutes ago? St. Paul, in the earliest of all his letters -- at least the earliest that we know about -- speaks directly to the fact that the Parousia, the day of resurrection and final judgment -- has been delayed. The Christians in Thessalonica are worried, we gather, that they are aging and dying before Judgment Day has arrived. So Paul writes: “We don’t want you to be uniformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died...since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died.”

 

 In fact, Paul says, on the day of the Lord’s coming “the dead in Christ will rise first. Then, we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever.” All of which is to say, I think, the time to prepare for what Paul assures the Thessalonians and us about is now -- not tomorrow, but now. The time to begin living faithfully is now, and we’ve got to figure out what living faithfully in Christ means. Two weeks from this morning, our last dalliance with St. Matthew the Gospel writer will offer some suggestions about that. You might want to read the rest of the 25th chapter if you’re curious. But the time to do these things -- living lives of faithfulness -- is now.

 

 The metaphor of five out-of-oil, out-of-luck bridesmaids standing outside a great banquet hall where a grand wedding feast is happening inside is a metaphor about waiting or not waiting to begin living lives of faithfulness. There are all sorts of implications here for both ancient and modern-day Christian folk, surely there are. The shout in the dark that calls us to get prepared for the coming of the bridegroom will illicit behavior modifications that differ among us, I expect. For some, the precious lamp oil of faithful living will be a simple attitude change from what can I get out of life to what can I give to the lives of others. For some, the precious oil will be an acknowledgement that the well-being of the larger community is more important than the comfort of my present condition. For others, the precious oil will simply be the purchase and ownership of a belief that Almighty God is sovereign over all of life and death and I am not.

 

 I remember reading about the courage and conviction of the late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Chicago, in the Chicago Tribune the year before he died. He had pancreatic cancer which had invaded his liver, and he had been given 7 months to live. The point of the newspaper article was that Cardinal Bernardin was using the immediate moment of life to bear witness to his faith, and perhaps accomplish more than most of us healthy preachers would get done in our lifetimes. Cardinal Bernardin was simply continuing what he’d always done, the paper said, which was to act now in response to what he realized Almighty God had already accomplished.

 

 For all of you who are members or servants of this community of faith, St. Philip Presbyterian Church, one of the acts of preparing now for faithful living is to decide how you’ll respond to the invitation of the Session to be the best possible steward of the resources God has given you and then to put a card and a time and talent form in the offering plate this morning that will say what your decision is.

 

 Be aware, dear friends, that the devil himself/herself lurks in the closets of our minds not just this year but every year during stewardship season, and he or she pops out at us with all sorts of tempting rationalizations about how and why to put off the act of faithful living that is faithful stewardship. There are other things to do, other priorities for my life, other values that I have to honor. You know how it goes. The groom will likely be delayed. I’ll put off until morning doing what needs to be done in order to be prepared. But, lo, at midnight, there was a shout in the dark, and the bridegroom came:

 

 “...and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

 

Amen.